Dan Foster Mysteries Archives

The Volcano, or the Rival Harlequins: A Dan Foster Mystery – The History Behind the Story

Last week I published a short story for Christmas: The Volcano, or the Rival Harlequins: A Dan Foster Mystery. It’s December 1799 and the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden is presenting …

Pugs, Bruisers and the Fancy: The Language of Pugilism

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, bare knuckle boxing was one of Britain’s most popular sports. It had its own slang: it was the world of the Fancy, of milling …

Carry him off in a patent coffin: body snatching in the eighteenth century

Occasionally Dan turned the pages of his newspaper. Someone was advertising a new design of coffin, secure enough to keep out body snatchers. Good luck with that, he thought. The …

True Crime and Fiction: the cases behind the Dan Foster Mysteries

The Dan Foster Mysteries follow the adventures of Bow Street Runner Dan Foster from the 1790s. It’s a series that depends on a steady supply of crimes, and though I’m …

The Contraband Killings Blog Tour 5 – 11 December 2022

The Contraband Killings: A Dan Foster Mystery is on a blog tour this week (5-11 December 2022). The tour will feature unique extracts, reviews and guest blogs. The schedule is …

Death Makes No Distinction Blog Tour – 25 November to 1 December 2019

Death Makes No Distinction is on a blog tour this week. The novel is the third in the Dan Foster Mystery series, which follows the fortunes and cases of Bow …

‘A Reformer’s Wife ought to be a heroine’: Women in the London Corresponding Society

In The Butcher’s Block, the second Dan Foster Mystery, Bow Street Runner Dan Foster infiltrates a fictitious, extremist branch of the London Corresponding Society (LCS) in Southwark, London. The LCS …

The Bristol Boys: The Bare Knuckle Champions and The Hatchet Inn

The Hatchet Inn on Frogmore Street in Bristol is all that remains of a row of seventeenth-century timbered houses dating back to 1606 – making it one of the city’s …

Dickens and Chickens

On 17 April 1860, in fields near Farnborough, Charles Dickens joined an audience amongst whom were the Prince of Wales and the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, as well as a …

Cribb’s Parlour: Tom Cribb

I’m an inveterate English Heritage blue-plaque spotter – and if I’d missed this one in Panton Street, Haymarket, London, the pub sign would have been enough to tell me that …

The Royale, Bush Theatre, London

When men campaigning for parliamentary reform in the eighteenth century planned to hold public meetings in defiance of government attempts to silence them, they were warned that they would be …

‘We will have a fire’: arson during eighteenth-century enclosures

“Inclosure came and trampled on the grave Of labours rights and left the poor a slave And memorys pride ere want to wealth did bow Is both the shadow and …